Birth Story:
Each day of that week I grew more and more miserable, and daily started begging Dr. S to deliver me. But he just said, “You’re rounding the final lap,” as though I were a horse racing toward the finish line in the Kentucky Derby.
By Thursday the 6th, I reached a point where I was so sick and miserable that I couldn’t eat or sleep. All I could do was lie on my side and moan in discomfort. I was gaining 2-4 lbs of fluid per day. You could touch any part of my legs and hear water squishing. My blood pressure, which we were required to take 4x a day, was increasing rapidly and I started to get sicker by the minute.
By Friday night (July 7), I had a low-grade fever, couldn’t eat at all, and my evening blood pressure was an appalling 180 over 110. My nurse freaked and put in a call to L&D, and was shocked that they didn’t request me over there immediately. Instead the clueless resident said for her to check my blood pressure hourly through the night (and make sure I was still alive). It climbed to over 200 on the top number. I couldn’t sleep all night for fear I’d never wake. I knew my organs could shut down any minute and I’d go into seizures because now I had full blown pre-eclampsia for sure. My nurse was on panic mode and none of us could fathom why they weren’t having me over to L&D either for observation or to deliver. It was because it was Friday night so no doctors were available. All night I lay staring into the darkness.
The next day, July 8, my regular monitoring appointment was pre-scheduled for the afternoon, but L&D called my room and told Mom they’d like me to be there at 9:30am. We were staying in a hotel-type room connected to the hospital, with a separate little living room where Mom slept on a bed in there, and I in the bedroom on the hospital bed.
“No,” I said to Mom. “I ordered a pancake and I’m going to take a shower first.”
She thought I was out of my mind, but I was firm—here they’d ignored me all night now they snapped their fingers I was supposed to come running over there? I was completely irrational, and slowly ate my pancake and took a long shower, knowing it would probably be the last one before I delivered, while Mom bit her nails and begged me to hurry.
Around 10am then, we went to L&D. Teresa was the physician on for the weekend, thank God. They immediately did a blood draw. It takes an hour to get the results back, but she put a rush order on it. Though she said nothing to me, I could tell things were not looking good when she ordered the resident to step aside, that she would do the ultrasound herself. She looked really contemplative and kept saying “hmmm” while moving the wand over my stomach for a long time. After about an hour, the blood results came back, and Teresa looked appalled at whatever she saw on the paper handed to her.
“Okay,” she said. “Your platelet count is below 100,000…” and she rattled off some other daunting statistics that I knew nothing about but by her look of doom and gloom I took to mean was not good and that my condition was critical. Then she said, “We’re taking the babies today.”
I clapped my hands and cheered because, as much as I dreaded major surgery, I was at that point so sick and overwrought that all I wanted was to deliver.
As soon as I did that, Teresa seemed like she wanted to drum into me the seriousness of the situation by saying that I had severe pre-eclampsia, so severe that we had to act immediately, that my system could shut down any minute which would be dangerous for the babies as well as me, that things were so critical for me that my life was in absolute danger. I sat up in the bed and asked when they’d do the epidural. “We don’t have time for that. We’re putting you under for an emergency C-section.”
Needless to say, I stopped cheering. I had planned on having a regular C-section. In fact, a nurse anesthetist had come in about a month before to ask whether I wanted an epidural or to be put under. I said initially “put under” but when I’d told Teresa that at my next appointment, she strongly urged that I choose the former. She said that pregnant women have a high risk of their stomach contents aspirating into their lungs while under anesthesia, that I’d have tubes down my throat, that it’s riskier for the babies. Naturally she threw in a couple of horror stories to convince me further. Immediately I got word to the anethetist that I wanted the epidural instead. Now, she was telling me we couldn’t do it after all, and all the horror stories came to mind.
I confessed to her about eating the pancake, and she said they would put a trachea clip on my throat, but I didn’t want more details.
She brought in a bevy of consent forms and quickly went through them in her same vein of doom, saying I may need a platelet or blood transfusion. And she confirmed one of my worst fears: I would have to go back on the magnesium sulfate as soon as I delivered.
I signed her papers in a panicked stupor as she gave orders to assemble the staff she needed in the OR and to prep me for surgery. I was in a regular L&D room with its own bathroom, so I took my glasses and contact lens case out of my bag and went in there to change into a gown and take out my contacts.
I’d love to sit here and say that I handled all this bravely and stoically, that I calmly said “Do what you need to do” and laid back on the bed so they could prep me. Instead, I called Mom into the bathroom, shut the door, and started bawling. I was scared—there’s simply no way to put a positive spin on having tubes down my throat, a trachea clip, a 9-inch slash across my skin and uterus, and pulling 2 bloody babies out of there. All the bullshit people say about childbirth being “natural” and “beautiful”—well, truth is, it’s an agonizing, bloody mess.
Then Mom put her hands on my shoulders and told me it was all going to be all right, that her faith was strong, that I’d made it so far already. Then she promptly burst into tears. We eventually got our heads together and I asked her to find someone to baptize the babies in case—well, in case things did not go well. She went out and did that while I pulled myself together, then I tried to walk out of there with a little dignity—or, with as much dignity as one can muster in a faded hospital gown, fuzzy hospital slippers, and Smurfette shower cap.
Mom later told me that she asked Teresa if she could be in the OR with me, but she said no, that it wasn’t going to be pretty in there and would bother her to see the tubes in my throat and the massive blood loss.
I was wheeled into the stark white OR, a very cold and metallic and bright room. I had mistakenly thought they would put me under before starting in on me, but Teresa said she only likes to use a very low dose of anesthesia on pregnant women, and they’d have to prep me beforehand! I was agonizingly ticklish when they spread the yellowish anti-bacteria all over my stomach. A nurse held a mask of oxygen over my fact that I kept turning from. It wasn’t from my own will that I was doing this, it was pure reflex, and Teresa apologetically told me they were going to have to tie my hands down, that “I know this seems like a form of torture” but that there was no other way. I screamed and thrashed as they got me ready. At last the anesthetist put the tube onto my IV and said it was time. I got such a head rush that I yelled, “I feel weird!” over and over until, mercifully, I was under. No doubt the medical staff was as relieved as I was.
Lm and Lk were born at 34 weeks and 1 day, on July 8, 2006.
Lm was born at 12:57pm weighing 4 lb, 12 oz.
Lk was born at 12:58pm weighing 5 lb, 1 oz.
The portion was a little too generous, as later they were on a sugar high and I had to let them run it off outisde for awhile. As mom said, "I think we need to take out a battery."
The portion was a little too generous, as later they were on a sugar high and I had to let them run it off outisde for awhile. As mom said, "I think we need to take out a battery."
